Finlay Pike’s Reviews > A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov > Status Update

— You make a lot of noise, yell, mouth radical phrases when you're young, but then you finish your educations, obtain nice little positions, get married, and become the same kind of exploiters and hard-driving masters as your papas."

“For you the revolution is an amusement, a sport, which you take up in your youth … but for us, the workers, the revolution is our element. … You look down on our struggle for our 'petty' material interests because you yourselves can live off your papas and mamas. The workers are forced to work not only to earn their own livelihoods, but also to produce the surplus value that makes your lives so plentiful. —

“Does it really make any difference whether you die ten years sooner or ten years later? Not if you die with pride in yourself for having lived a life that was not in vain. What is really frightening is the opposite; what is frightening is content with this animal, beastly existence.“

“I was being drawn to the factory, to the people who worked there, who were becoming my near ones, my family. I had the feeling that I was merging with the factory, with its stern poetry of labor, a poetry that was growing dearer and closer to me than the quiet, peaceful, lazy poetry of our drowsy village life.”